Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader writes "The title says it all, really; Steve Jobs has resigned as the CEO of Apple, and would like to become Chairman of the Board. Reasons are not specified, but his declining health of recent years is a likely candidate. He's named Tim Cook as his successor."

Well on one hand, its better to do these things while everyone is still healthy and of sound mind. It's a sad day for sure, but on a positive note, Steve has set a high bar for Apple to maintain. Combine this news with the fact that Steve's official BIO has been pushed up to be released sooner than expected...it doesn't look good.
Be well Steve!

He mostly set it in design. But realistically, he took the whole open platforms and devices to really bad direction with the closeness of iOS and maybe upcoming Macs. Would you really want that for computer world?

Probably because PCs (yes, this includes Apple's line of computers, sorry fanbois) are so widespread and people still hold significant control over their own computation. If all computers were like the iPad, you can bet that more people would care about openness and all the things that gave rise to the PC revolution in the first place.

And all computers *won't* be like the iPad. This is a scenario that is invented whole cloth out of an irrational fear you and many other people here hold. You will always, for the rest of your life, be able to buy a Linux PC, Linux tablet, Linux phone, Linux whatever. Or possibly replace "Linux" with whatever open system replaces it if that happens during your lifetime.

Do you know why that statement is true? That statement is true because people do care about openness and would not be happy if all computers were like the iPad.

The average technophobe doesn't worry about openness because they already have it and take it for granted, much like the average airline passenger takes for granted that the plane their flying on wont fall apart. What they dont know, nor want to know is that a lot of work goes on in the background by very dedicated people to ensure that everyone can enjoy the boon of openness or safe flights.

Shove the average person into a world of "closedness" and they'll start caring about it quick smart.

I feel that the "mechanical safety is to aircraft engineers argument as openness is to average people" argument is a bit lacking. Most average people care about the safety of the aircraft that they fly in, not just aircraft engineers. The average person might not know how it works, why it works, or what it takes to fix it. The average person just wants it to work (which is the same argument a lot of people make about Macs / iProducts... "they just work").
Shoot, you could almost argue that aircraft eng

[quote]Come up with some studies showing people's reasons for buying an iPad and I'd pay attention. But just saying, "They sold more of them, that means that they love X 'feature'" isn't necessarily true.[/quote]

Fine, then go lookup customer satisfaction numbers and return rates for iPads/iPhones vs Android tablets/smartphones. Or are these figures also somehow not indicative of the fact that people buy Apple products because they happen to like them, in various ways?

"Wait, when a consumer spends a dollar for a iBlah, it's a vote for closed garden."

This is a straw man. The argument here is not that people WANT a closed garden, it is that they don't care. I sincerely doubt that openness figures in people's minds when they buy a consumer product and Apple have proven this with the iPad sales vs. any other tablet. So Android's lead in the phone market is likely to be to something else. Most likely the availability of low-end Android handsets.

Obviously, this is an indirect consequence of the closed garden. Apple does not compete for low-end markets, so there is no low end iOS devices. However, if Samsung didn't compete for low end Android phones, someone else would because Android is open.

But this doesn't change the fact that the consumer doesn't care about openness, even if they do care about some of the indirect consequences, and if Apple decided to compete for the low-end market by introducing an iPhone Nano, they would most likely own that market as well.

I can't number the times I moved iTunes from OS 8 to OS 9 to OS X, from a 5500/225 to a G3 B&W, to a G4 MDD, to the current G5 dual processor. Can't number the number of hard drives I migrated all my apps and data between OS reinstalls or updates.

I can, however, number all the times I lost the content on the iPod:

0. That's ZERO. The big Goose Egg.

Sorry about your fuckup. Sucks to be you. Next time, read the instructions and don't click OK on every popup without reading and understanding what you are about to do.

I should add, just because I am a bit OCD that way, I also moved all my music from SoundJam MP on a System 7 PPC Mac TO the 5500/225, running OS8 (and eventually OS9.2.1 (thank you, OS 9 Helper)) and on that Mac, moved the SoundJam MP library to iTunes.

Indeed, and it's only gotten more ridiculous. It's 2011 and you STILL cannot drag and drop MP3s to your i device, you STILL cannot delete songs from your i device without a computer and you STILL cannot use your i device to transfer files to a new computer.

Those were features which were common a decade ago.

And while yes, one can simply not buy apple products, I don't think that's sufficient. Even if you don't buy, everyone else is, and together they're helping define your data as "someone else's pr

Indeed, and it's only gotten more ridiculous. It's 2011 and you STILL cannot drag and drop MP3s to your i device, you STILL cannot delete songs from your i device without a computer and you STILL cannot use your i device to transfer files to a new computer.

Most people like being able to sync by only plugging in a cable. For me it's much easier. Maybe you like micro-managing the syncing of your MP3 player, I don't. I did that with the Rio Diamond and I hated it.

I had an eye-opening experience back when i bought my one apple product, an ipod nano (7 years or so ago), the 8GB model.
I had it loaded up with music, and after reinstalling, wanted to get my music back by syncing it with the newly installed itunes.
The result was a wiped ipod, as apple does not want me to own my data. Lession leaned.

PEBCAK.
1) Wipe iPod and enable for disk use.
2) Back up music library before reinstalling OS.
3) Drag music files back into iTunes.
4) Go on with life.

Unless you meant that the lesson learned was to back your shit up before reinstalling, you learned the wrong lesson.

By any reasonable definition, it's a backup, since the files are physically there. It does, however, deliberately pretend for them to be inaccessible, unlike every other similar device on the planet.

Case in point: when I bought my (non-computer-savvy) mother an iPad, the first thing that got her extremely annoyed was that she couldn't just drag and drop files to it in Explorer like she used to do with her USB sticks, MP3 player, and camera, but had to go through setting up sync in iTunes. She doesn't know what iTunes is, and doesn't want to learn yet another way of doing the exact same thing she already knows how to do.

Hand cranking a car and the weekly maintenance of lead/acid batteries were basic tasks that taught to drivers in times gone by.

Modern cars have starter motors and sealed batteries. And so the driver has to do less.

We're also in the process of moving from people navigating by paper map to GPS.

We're only 30-40 years into the development of personal computer systems. Exposed file systems and the necessary manual file management is a feature of primitive computing systems. Technology is beginning to move away f

Yeah, seriously. If you want to copy your music from your iPhone to your computer, it couldn't be simpler:

1) Jailbreak2) Install an SFTP program3) Set autolock to 'never'4) Open your FTP program, use your devices address as the host, set the username to "root" and the password to "alpine," or "dottie", set the port to 225) connect via SSH and navigate to/private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/Music/6) copy away!

Honestly, it's so super simple that my grandma was able to figure it out on her own!

Seeing a problem and warning other just helps keep the consumer aware of the limitation of the device they are purchasing.

" If yes, STFU, you KNEW what you were getting into when you laid down the plastic at the Apple Store or Amazon."Since apple doesn't go out of there way to tell people of their limitations, how do you know he was fully informed?

Seeing a problem and warning other just helps keep the consumer aware of the limitation of the device they are purchasing.

" If yes, STFU, you KNEW what you were getting into when you laid down the plastic at the Apple Store or Amazon."
Since apple doesn't go out of there way to tell people of their limitations, how do you know he was fully informed?

Limitation? It's a fucking appliance, dude -- you don't buy a dishwasher if you want to do something besides wash dishes, do you? Apple devices are aimed at people that want the functionality, and have zero interest or desire in the mechanism that delivers the functionality. I'm a sysadmin, not a motorcycle geek -- I buy a motorcycle not because it is the most fuel efficient one, or the most mechanically reliable one. I bought a Ducati 1098 because it does what I fucking want it to do -- go insanely fast and look really good in my parking slot at work. I admin linux/windows/solaris/HPUX boxen, but I use an iPhone and an iPad because they do what I want them to do without having to RTFM. Just like my Ducati and my dishwasher.

He mostly set it in design. But realistically, he took the whole open platforms and devices to really bad direction with the closeness of iOS and maybe upcoming Macs. Would you really want that for computer world?

What a silly question.

Open systems need competition from closed systems just as closed systems need competition from open systems.

A complete lack of direction cannot be the only way forward, and lack of diversity is not healthy. You need both.

Open systems need competition from closed systems just as closed systems need competition from open systems.

Open systems ensure competition even in a world with no closed systems. Of course, to keep things completely competitive you actually need open source, and open systems might not be enough, but closed systems don't enter into the equation.

It isn't taste, so much as the mass of people don't really need to do anything particularly special with a computer. Or any other thing really.

You might, and I write might because most people here are complete posers, need your computer to do something particularly taxing or specialized. In the MS-DOS days people mostly needed to correct a paper they wrote without using up all their correction tape, or maintain a basic spreadsheet, or sort a list. No one needed a multi user UNIX machine for that nor did it makes sense to pay for one. MS-DOS and Windows built on top of it was adequate and cheap.

I'm geeky about rifles. ANd having been a USMC 8541 my tastes run toward quality. When I walk into a rifle shop and see stacks of plastic stocked lowest bidder sticks I think about how people have no taste. But in reality some guy who shoots a deer a year at 75 yards has no need for a McMillan handle and would never ask enough of it appreciate the difference.

As much as Bill Gates may have been a royal thieving bastard, and as much as I loathe most of what Redmond has done over the last twenty years, anybody who says that Bill Gates was less important that Steve Jobs to the computer world is out of their minds. Gates' MS-BASIC became THE interpreted language of the late 1970s and right through the 1980s. Whatever the source of MS-DOS, the fact is that he built a mighty software empire at the same time as Apple was treating its product line like a walled garden. Yes, Gates had significant help from IBM, but the mere fact that the overwhelming majority of personal computers out there are running one of Microsoft's operating systems, and have been doing so since the final bell tolled for the 8-bit world in the late 1980s pretty much indicates that what you wrote is pure nonsense. Steve Jobs has his place in history, no doubt, but Bill Gates' role, particularly for that twenty year period from the mid-70s into the mid-90s is a primary one in the development of modern consumer and business computing.

So "freedom" and "open" will always be around and available for the people who want it. And I'm glad that's the case. But for me and right now, I'd rather have computers and devices that just work and do so well. If that means they are so-called "closed", then so be it.

I don't think you are fully appreciating what "openness" means. We are not just talking about "open source" or "open standards" here.

You think you do not care about openness? How would you like to be charged by the CPU-minute to use a computer?

Why exactly is the resignation of any CEO, of any company, 'sad' news? I don't wish him ill, but I don't see how this is sad at all. Times change, people change, employees (yes even CEO's) come and go. It's just business.

Why exactly is the resignation of any CEO, of any company, 'sad' news? I don't wish him ill, but I don't see how this is sad at all. Times change, people change, employees (yes even CEO's) come and go. It's just business.

Wrong. You know who designed all those products, created them? Not Steve Jobs. I'm sure he has input, but ultimately he is propped up to be the godlike driving force behind Apple, which is nothing resembling the truth. Possibly the best thing to happen out of this will be to see the next Apple product (discounting what was in the pipeline while Jobs was at the helm) be of the same exact quality as what they're making now, and watch people's astonished reactions when they realize that in truth, Steve Jobs ha

Steve Jobs is the embodiment of the American Dream, there are scant few individuals on this earth than can attest to the scale of success that he has achieved. Others can better write platitudes of the specifics than I; however it is always a sad day when a great leader is forced to step down, especially when they are at the height of their success. Such is the human condition I suppose.

Steve Jobs is the embodiment of the American Dream, there are scant few individuals on this earth than can attest to the scale of success that he has achieved.

Jobs is arguably the best business leader of our era.

He co-founded the hugely successful Apple out of the proverbial garage, got fired from his own company, went off and started NeXT, bought Pixar from George Lucas and turned it into something big. At the same time, he came back to Apple, made a huge hit with the iMac, then the iPod, then the iPhone, and now the iPad. Now Apple one of the most successful companies around. I'm not sure if any other business leader's accomplishments could beat that story.

What impresses me is, as others have said, he actually cared about the products his company made. He wanted to make a "dent in the universe" and he actually did. He didn't do it by managing to costs or other things that business schools tell people to do, but by putting products and the user experience first.

Do you want to resign at the top or the bottom? If popularity and public perception of you is important, you'd say the top. You'll want your successes to define you, not your failures. You'll want others to know you at your best, not at your worst.

Alas, while Steve Jobs certainly knows all of this, I think his resignation may be more due to his health than any matter of perception. Being CEO is a stressful job, and having remained as CEO all this time was not really doing his already-unwell body any favors.

I don't know how you did it, but you seem to have forgotten about this device called the iPod. Yeah, it brought PMPs to the mainstream. Apple sold a metric butt-load of them and made a mint in the process. Oh yeah, they also created an iTunes store, sold over 10,000,000,000 songs and other related media, and now sells more music than anyone else on the planet, including Walmart.

iOS and iPhone didn't save Apple, it catapulted them from ludicrously successful to can't-talk-I'm-having-too-many-orgasms-all-the-time successful.

Perhaps you didn't hear that Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, then Apple failed in his absence, then Jobs came back and orchestrated the greatest comeback in corporate history, and made stockholders like myself a fortune.

Apple also bought NeXT from Jobs for millions, and it became the Mac OS.

Oh, and this thing he bought called "Pixar" for $5M? He turned it into the most successful movie studio in history, and sold it for like $6 billion.

do you really think he'd resign if his health was 100%? The fact that he's stepping down is definitely worrying, it's not likely he's stepping down to go work for another company or doing something else.

And no, I don't know him in person, but I definitely respect him and his accomplishments, and wish him well, and I'm sure a lot of others are feeling the same way.

If Apple history is any indication, tough times are ahead for Apple as they've only been successful in the past under Jobs direction. That might be why it's considered sad news by some. Me, I'm more curious about how things will change with a different CEO.

Because unfortunately Steve was one of the few CEOs of big American Corps that actually gave 2 shits about the product that his company made. Outside of a few others(Google being chief among them), the modern American CEO couldn't really give a flying fuck about what the company actually makes(see Balmer, Fiorna). They are there to absorb as much money as they can while doing nothing but playing financial games with the company's balance sheets. Love him or hate him, you cannot deny that Steve was genuinely passionate about technology.

I am pretty optimistic about Apple, though, in the immediate post-Jobs era. The reason is because Jobs didn't just drive the development of great products; he also developed great people. The entire top leadership of Apple, not least Tim Cook who will replace him, follows and contributes to Jobs' philosophy on product design, markets to jump into, how to use the company's resources to secure strategic future technologies, when and why to kill your baby. In other words, it's at least a good 5 or 10 years before Apple's management culture starts to change significantly, meaning that Apple will continue to drive in the direction they've been going since Jobs came back in the late 1990s. As someone who really likes that direction, towards a simplified and thus more broadly useful application of technology, that makes me content.

I wouldn't use OSX if you paid me (though I would if the only alternative were Windows), and I loathe the whole iPlayskool aesthetic and hype, BUT

1) Steve Jobs is a human being and this does not bode well for his health, and2) In an economy which now rewards people with fortunes for manipulating other peoples' money and creating absolutely nothing useful, Jobs has been a true visionary with the guts to actually build things that people can use. He's a rare bird in these parts, possibly the last of a breed.

It's not Carly Fiorina coming in and fucking up HP for a few years and leaving - Steve Jobs started the company, worked there ~10 years, left for a few, then came back and was CEO for 14 more. No other CEO on the planet is so closely associated with their company. As a pillar of the tech industry, his input drove the state of the art forward. It is a loss for the tech world when any big name leaves for good. By the way, this website is called Slashdot, and its a place for "News for Nerds," you know, people who generally care about technology.

He already did the Obi-Wan Gandalf Jesus thing, remember, when he came back to Apple and saved their bacon after they fired him.

Jobs proved once and for all that F. Scott Fitzgerald was full of shit when he said something to the effect of "There are no second acts in American success stories," but it's pretty clear there isn't going to be a third, at least not this time.

There has already been a third act, Apple 2. Act 2 was Pixar, you know, the little animation company. One could even argue that NeXT was another act, although that could be seen as part of the third act.

No exaggeration. This is one of the only tech news stories that I've actually heard about IRL instead of the internet. Someone actually looked at me on the sidewalk and said "Oh my God, Steve Jobs retired!"

I said "FIRST PSOT!!!!" and was trying to think how to use HTML formatting to link to a relevant XKCD before I realized it was a conversation and not slashdot. But it's okay, I'm safely back in Mom's basement now.

You're under the assumption that nobody can drive a tech company like Jobs. If that is the case, even a very ill Steve would be better than a fully healthy somebody else. But that may not be good for Steve.

The one thing Steve brought to Apple was the last details that are often missing from products. You may not like the iPhone lockdown or Macs or whatnot, but to ignore where smartphones and tablets are today, you have to admit that AAPL was THE driving force behind those products. THEY got it right, first time, out of the box.

Even though I don't qualify as an Apple Fanboy, Steve's impact on the world of computing is felt everyday by all of us.
While Xerox PARC did the original GUI environment, and invented little things like the Mouse, Steve's vision with the Mac changed the computer world. It made computer accessible, influencing Windows and other OSs to make their system accessible to the masses.
Apple, Next, Pixar, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPads.
I believe Steve made the world better.

Xerox PARC *DID NOT* "do" the original GUI environment. Doug Engelbart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart) did it at SRI.Xerox PARC *DID NOT* invent the mouse. Engelbart did it also at SRI.

Even if Macs are expensive, they popularized the idea of a consumer-friendly UI, and the GUI in general. Xerox may have invented the GUI, but without Jobs it would have sat in a lab for who knows how long. He brought it to the masses, and made computers something even non-nerds used on a regular basis. Even if they weren't his computers that they used.

Woz was a better engineer. No question. Jobs had the ability to take a vision of a product, give it to the engineers, and have them make it a reality. A

Yes, Woz is an amazing engineer, and Jobs is a sales guy. But Jobs had the vision that Woz lacked. If Jobs hadn't convinced Woz to join him in founding Apple, Woz would have remained just another engineer at HP or wherever. The truth is that everything that Apple has done has been the vision of Jobs (except during the exile years when Apple had no vision). Jobs just needed a good engineer to implement his vision of what personal computing should be. In the beginning, that was Woz. In Apple 2.0, that has bee

It was designer Steve Jobs that focused on the systematic problems of computer usage that changed the world.

What on God's green earth are you talking about? Steve Jobs was not the one who saw a problem with the corporate vision of computing-as-a-utility. Wozniak was the one who aligned with people like Lee Felsenstein and the Homebrew Computer Club, and Wozniak was the one who designed PCs that people wanted. Steve Jobs did not envisioned the GUI interface, the mouse, video games, WYSIWYG, tablets, PDAs, smartphones, or anything else that has made Apple a successful company.

Steve Jobs has two talents: the ability to see what products can be marketed, and the ability to market those products to home computer users. He is not a designer of anything other than good business plans.

You must have missed the part where I gave Jobs credit for his marketing talent.

He didn't miss that part. It was simply wrong.

Oh sure Jobs has some marketing talent. But far more than that, he has the ability to EXECUTE a product.

That means taking raw technologies and forming them into something people actually want to buy. It means betting on the right technologies for a long lasting platform, or having the skill to make what you picked work for you (really a mixture of both).

Marketing is the very tiny tip of the iceberg where you try to get through to people what you have actually made. But it doesn't help at all unless people want to buy what you have made. You can't market a bad product from a cold start with no rep, and unless you have built up a good reputation over time with products people have liked using they are not going to trust that your product is what you say it is.

Jobs is also really good at being willing to move on to new frontiers instead of simply milking what they have to death. That is what I think he spent to most time trying to drill into Cook and other Apple execs, hopefully the message has got through.

End of an era. I started with an Apple ][+ and am typing this on my iPad 2. These definitely been ups and downs, and I still love the old NeXTStep OS.

On the plus side, it looks like the short term (next 1-2 years) is taken care of.iPhone5-cross carrieriPad3The new paradigm machines due out later this year (not sure what this is besides an A5 ultralight/ultra cheap)AppleTV becomes a game console.

Live well, Steve. You may have been pompous and arrogant, but you cared about the design.

I'd say the bigger question is this: can they keep the vision? Lets be honest folks iPhone 5 and iPad 4 and probably one or two more iPods were already in the pipe under Job's watch, but what after?

Like it or not it is the vision of Jobs that made Apple. look at how they sucked without him before, it ended up an MBA clusterfuck, hell look at what happened to MSFT when they lost Gates, another MBA clusterfuck.

To me the difference between Jobs and the MBAs can be summed up by a story I read by one of the guy

Why, that sounds just like the time that Apple still had over a billion in the bank and Microsoft paid them off to settle a copyright infringement case.

The copyright infringement was not look and feel, but code stolen by a third party company on behalf of Intel/Microsoft. Quicktime code knowingly ended up in Media Player which was shipping at that point.

"Then, maybe, just maybe, I could consider buying a Mac. But then again, more factories like Foxconn wouldn't exactly be great."

Right. Because those Foxconn components in your Dell, HP, or Lenovo PC, or Android phone are made by the *not* evil Foxconn. You know, the one in Iowa where everyone makes UAW level wages, gets free health care and plenty of paid time off.....

I know you're a dumb troll, but Slashdot has actually turned sharply against Apple since Android came out. Basically, the site is opposed to any of Google's direct competitors, even if they once admired them.